The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some network devices, such as network switches, routers, edge devices and the like employ parallel packet processing of packet streams in which multiple packet processing elements simultaneously and in parallel perform processing of different packets. In such embodiments, it is important to efficiently utilize multiple processing elements to concurrently perform parallel processing of packets belonging to a data flow while efficiently maintaining an order of packets within the data flow.